Keeping accurate track of sales is essential for a business, and a streamlined process will help you avoid errors that could cost you down the road. The burden of sales reporting usually rests on the shoulders of small business owners. Several methods for keeping track of sales are available, but a spreadsheet program offers an affordable means for accurate reporting that you can customize to your needs.

Categorize your product base. Depending on your business, you can choose to give items individual identification numbers for tracking. You can also group products into categories to help you use the data from your sales report to determine future business decisions. If your store is online, you can use a shopping cart software or e-commerce application to create your catalog.

Decide what you want to track, whether it is total sales, sales by item or sales by category. You might also want to track sales by salesperson to gauge employee performance. You can produce reports on a weekly or monthly basis, depending on your needs.

Enter data into a spreadsheet program. Add columns for date, total sales, sales by category, sales by salesperson and other individual items as desired. To get a better idea of trends, you can create a separate spreadsheet for each month of the year.

Enter calculations under each column name, using the sum function of the spreadsheet program. You will need to select the rows that correspond to the days of the month for each item.

Compile a monthly report after the end of each month. This report summarizes the information gathered from the daily report. You can link this data to a separate spreadsheet that lists data for each month so you can complete an annual sales report.

Add a graph to the yearly sales spreadsheet, according to your program's instructions. Using a graph allows you to visualize trends. The graph takes data from your monthly summary section to populate it.

Repeat the previous two steps for each type of information you want to track. For example, if you want to follow sales by category by month, add labels in your monthly report and link the data from the daily sheet as per your spreadsheet program's instructions.

Things Needed

Spreadsheet program

Tips

Use of borders or fill colors can help separate items and make your spreadsheet easier to read.

Use your sales data to make adjustments in inventory.

If you sell one of a product, such as a piece of original artwork, you should group sales by category rather than on an individual basis for your sales report.

Warning

Backup your data regularly and store it on a USB drive or through a cloud app to avoid data loss stemming from a computer malfunction.

About the Author

Chris Dinesen Rogers has been online marketing for more than eight years. She has grown her own art business through SEO and social media and is a consultant specializing in SEO and website development. Her past work experience includes teaching pre-nursing students beginning biology, human anatomy and physiology. Rogers's more than 10 years in conservation makes her equally at home in the outdoors.